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Minnesota-resident Pakistani-born Ilyas Ahmed
debuted as one of the many prolific solo-guitarists in the vein of
John Fahey
and
Jack Rose,
but he leaned towards the raga-psychedelic end of the spectrum.
In his debut album Between Two Skies (2005)
the acoustic guitar is not the only protagonist but the center of mass for a blurred soundscape of wordless vocals, piano, eerie drones and sparse percussion.
This acousting, fingerpicking, post-folk rhapsodies borders on
new-age music in Black Midas and
pastoral trance
in Night Song (like Leo Kottke performing
a minimalist concert),
but creates a transcendental gothic atmosphere in
As Those Above
and evokes a ghostly purgatory in Samanjhna.
The 16-minute To You Soon/ Silence the High is at first a
chaotic and discordant jam in the vein of
free-jazz and abstract soundscaping, and then a surreal exotic dance.
The four acoustic guitar improvisations of Towards The Night (2006) are
the recording that established him next to the classics.
Circular Sky (7:44) is a pensive stream of consciousness, and
Golden Eyes (7:36) a tormented colloquial portrait.
Satanta's Hand (14:56) embraces a hybrid of slow Zen trance and blues rumination.
Crowning the album is Shumsun (13:05),
a more aggressive concerto of cascading overtones.
Century Of Moonlight (2006)
opens in an atmosphere of spiritual mystery with Softly Tomorrow, which sounds like the remix of a Buddhist prayer,
and peaks with
the 13-minute Red Spring, one of his most cryptic and subliminal improvisations, pared with a harrowing soundscape that combines an alien drone with percussive noise.
The album toys with dissonance in the
slowly liquefying jam The Gathering.
The 13-minute Kabhi Ma Boley Ashista is a raga for droning vocals and tanpura against free-form guitar and sitar jamming.
Yahan Aur Wahan (2006) is another set of four lengthy improvisations, but this time the cohesion and the pathos are largely missing,
especially in the chanted (and monotonous) Suddenly Expected (11:23)
and in the flamenco-ish 1000 Lights (7:40).
The Fahey-esque 100 Veils (9:57) and
the ethereal and impressionistic Descend Again (9:21) fare better.
During 2006 he relocated to Oregon.
The 31-minute lament/prayer Speaking Of Shadows (2006) is very much driven
by the chanting, perhaps influenced by Pakistani vocal music, with an
intermezzo of dissonant chamber music.
The Vertigo Of Dawn (Time-Lag, 2008) compiles early works.
Goner (Root Strata, 2009) was his "rock" album:
electric guitar, bass and drums and virtually no acoustic instrument.
bombastic songs like Earn your Blood are an odd hybrid of roaring southern boogie and prog-rock jamming.
His singing is a murky howling in songs like Out Again
and a slurred indistinct whisper in Enter a Shadow; hardly pleasant.
The Caribbean quasi-samba rhythm of As Another is an irksome support for
the nine-minute dream-pop tune.
Ahmed, however, had not completely mastered the electric guitar and the singing
on the confused
With Endless Fire (Immune, 2012), containing the nine-minute droning
meditation Now Sleeps,
the hallucinatory vignette Sapphire and the dreamy dilated lullaby By The Light,
but also more aimless bombast in the vein of Goner like Stained Sky
and the eight-minute My Mirage.
The eight-song mini-album I Am All Your Own (2015) returned to a humbler
acoustic format but insisted on the vocals. Ahmed
flirts with slocore in the soft psychedelia of City Daze and in
the delicate folk elegy The Last Laugh.
Closer to Stranger (2018), that contains shorter pieces, mostly
heavily psychedelic slocore and dream-pop vignettes with metaphysical lyrics
(notably Meditation On The Split Self and Fever Pitch).
The cassette
Behold Killers (Geographic North, 2019) nostalgically returned to the format of four lengthy meditations (well, actually three), except that
Pass No Jazz (15:51) is immersed in a claustrophobic industrial soundscape, a far cry for the bucolic atmospheres of 2006.
No less intriguing is Metal Freedom (10:22), that bridges pastoral ecstasy and floating psychedelic ether.
Wild Violet (8:56) is the new Red Spring, a fragile sparkling stream of consciousness that evokes solitary sunsets.
This humble cassette marks a surprising return to form.
Ahmed then turned to static/stately ambient music with
the 40-minute piece of How to Transform Into Complete and Total Silence (2020)
and the 20-minute piece of Sudden Venom (2020).
You Can See Your Own Way Out (Devotion, 2021) documents a collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.
The guitarscapes of A Dream of Another (Geographic North, 2023) venture
beyond ambient music, into glitchy territory.
The seven-minute Etched in Smoke activates ripples of murky metallic sounds and the ten-minute A Dream of Something mixes jazzy guitarwork with
synth drones.
Ilyas Ahmed also joined the
Grails.
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